All Her Children

Family agonies in Anne Enright’s “The Green Road.”

Family life can seem metaphysically enormous, comprehensively intense, and everything at once: a little society and a conspiracy against society; an inherently conservative unit bristling with radical splinters; the most efficient imaginable conduit for the transfer of misery and the source of all joy. It engrosses, it stuns, it distracts, and it overwhelms. It drags one in the wake of its moral inertia. “Family happiness completely absorbs me,” Tolstoy wrote in his diary, in 1863, “and it’s impossible to do anything.” But family unhappiness would doubtless have been as absorbing, unhappy families being unhappy in their own way.

More than most contemporary writers, the Irish novelist Anne Enright finds it hard to escape the tidal pull of the family. In a series of funny, bleak, radically unsentimental novels, she has examined the engrossments of such life and has pored over the social genetics of family inheritance—the unhappiness we bequeath, the pleasure we inherit, the tyranny of biological contingency. Like “The Gathering” (2007), in which the narrator tells the story of her brother’s suicide, in Brighton, and the consequent wake, her latest novel, “The Green Road” (Norton), is about a clan’s dispersal and reunion. And it, too, has a complicated matriarch at its center. We first encounter Rosaleen Madigan in 1980, in County Clare. Rosaleen’s eldest son, Dan, back from his first year of college, has declared that he wants to be a priest. In response, his mother takes to her bed. It’s not the first time she has employed what Dan calls “the horizontal solution,” but it is the longest application of these particular histrionics. A life of celibacy will mean no grandchildren, no little Dans, from the child who appears to be Rosaleen’s favorite. Dan’s siblings—an elder sister named Constance and a younger brother and sister, Emmet and Hanna—are studious readers of their mother’s selfish passions, lurking around a house become silent and large without their mother’s downstairs presence. Their father is the mild Moses who occasionally ascends to the parental bedroom to bring back the opaque judgments and laws. But there is something more in this pain, something unexplained. “I made him,” Rosaleen says to Hanna of Dan when she finally emerges from her theatrical stupor. “I made him the way he is. He is my son and I don’t like him, and he doesn’t like me either.” When Hanna soothingly replies, “But you like me, Mammy,” her mother offers only the limited lease of the eternal tyrant: “I like you now.”

Enright possesses an unusual combination of talents. She is a rich, lyrical prose writer, who cascades among novelties—again and again, she finds the unexpected adjective, the just noun. A glass of soda, the “surface of it a hush of bubbles.” A stray dog backing away from its owner “in a palsy of hind limbs.” But she is at the same time a brisk and satirical aphorist, who often conceals more than she displays. In an early novel, “What Are You Like?” (2000), a woman is described as having “a big anxious head and smug little feet.” Enright’s sentences often waver, enigmatically: “After the pub they ran down a lane and were suddenly in a place where everyone smelt of the rain.” Or: “She cried the way she always cried in the evening: vague tears.” Late in “The Green Road,” anxious that his mother has died, Dan feels a child’s need for his parent, and feels it “like a whiteness inside his chest.”

Hanna Madigan thinks of her grandmother as “a woman who looked like she had a lot to say, and wasn’t saying any of it.” In the same way, Enright can look as if she were saying something that she is actually concealing. There is a familiar Irish talkiness in her work—eloquent, heated, intimate—that is combined with a bitter reticence akin to that of Harold Pinter’s dramas. (The book might have been named “The Homecoming.”) We are not told exactly why Dan’s announcement brought on his mother’s collapse. What did Rosaleen mean when she told Hanna that she didn’t like Dan? We gather the answer only from juxtaposition and implication. In the book’s second chapter, we leap forward eleven years, to 1991, and to New York City, where Dan is now living. He did not become a priest, and although he has a girlfriend whom he assures everyone he is going to marry, he is having an intermittent relationship with a young man named Billy. Perhaps Dan is bisexual, though none of his gay friends are in any real doubt about the matter, and they appraise the wife-to-be without mercy: “Skinny, as they often are. . . . a classic beard,” with “the unreliable little ribcage, with a pair of those flat little triangular breasts like flesh origami: also lumpy bits from waist to hip where her underwear was a bit too pragmatic.” The answer to the question is obliquely provided; Rosaleen probably intuited Dan’s orientation, and took the declaration of priestly celibacy to be a transferred confession.

The novel moves forward in bursts of acceleration, each new section set in a different period, and each devoted to one of the Madigan children, now grown up. These chapters, generally narrated in a free indirect style fairly close to interior monologue, tend to linger on a state of arrest or frozen crisis. Life happens more speedily offstage, in the gaps between the sections.

There is Constance, in 1997, now thirty-seven, who is waiting at a hospital in County Limerick to learn whether or not she has breast cancer. She has three children, is married to a contractor, and has a widowed mother. (So Rosaleen must now be alone.) Her life seems circumscribed, satisfying, banal, disappointing. Like Dan, she went to New York: “This was the place you went to get a whole new life, and all she got was a couple of Eileen Fisher cardigans in lilac and grey.” She has “two sons who told her nothing and a husband who told her nothing and a father who told her nothing and then died.” There is Emmet, in 2002, who is thirty-eight and working for an N.G.O. in Mali, dealing daily with death and disease. He is austerely charitable, committed to the rigorous politics of international aid and development: “He remembered Geneva airport, a place where he had, after a tough sixteen months in the Sudan, experienced an overwhelming urge to lie down on the clean, perfumed floor.” There is Hanna, in Dublin in 2005, struggling to maintain a career as an actress: “Hanna had the wrong face for a grown-up woman, even if there were parts for grown-up women. The detective inspector. The mistress. No, Hanna had a girlfriend face, pretty, winsome and sad. And she was thirty-seven. She had run out of time.”

“The Green Road” is a more conventional novel than anything Enright has written, and these episodes at times have the air of burnished performance. A difficulty with novels that stop and start, that spread their form among various characters and locales, is that much of the narrative energy gets diverted away from a continuous project and into the repeated establishment of new fictional constructions: each chapter becomes an unwanted test case, as the reader waits to see if Enright can “do” early-nineties New York, or Mali. Enright can indeed raise these varied novelistic pop-ups. But the book’s first thirty pages, set in Ireland, a world she knows down to its roots, have a kind of vitality and particularity absent from the chapters set elsewhere. Here is Ireland:

Emmet said their Grandfather Madigan was shot during the Civil War and their Grandfather Considine refused to help. The men ran to the Medical Hall looking for ointment and bandages and he just pulled down the blind, he said. But nobody believed Emmet. Their Grandfather Madigan died of diabetes years ago, they had to take off his foot.

This is storytelling, with the blood-pulse of lived gossip, that little run-on final sentence bearing witness to its coursing unstoppability. Inevitably, Enright’s Manhattan shows little of that insider’s possession, and her portrait of a city stalked by AIDS, sensitive as it is, occasionally resembles only learned gossip:

Various things happened. Massimo went off with Mandy to her family bolt-hole in the Caribbean, Billy held a dinner party which was a qualified success. Arthur published his book on Bonnard and wept for Max (who had detested Bonnard: who spat at the mention of Bonnard) at the launch. Then Emily von Raabs came to town and she hosted a large and informal supper in her wonderfully ramshackle house on East 10th.

The second half of “The Green Road” returns to Rosaleen’s house in County Clare, where the novel lives and breathes, and where the Madigan children must return also, hauling their caravan of complications. It is Christmastime, 2005, and a gathering is taking place at the house in which the Madigans were raised. The last hundred pages are beautifully searching and sad, shot through with difficult wisdom and with much tart comedy. Rosaleen, always demanding, has become monstrously manipulative and self-pitying in old age, “a woman who did nothing and expected everything. She sat in this house, year after year, and she expected.” She gave her children everything, and of course they have disappointed her, and she is content to tell them so. Emmet jokes to Hanna: “At least you didn’t go bald. . . . She took that very personally.” Constance gives her mother an expensive silk scarf, but Rosaleen is not above the timeworn power play: “This is far too good for me.” Enright writes, wickedly, that Rosaleen “hated being upstaged by her own clothes.” In the end, Dan thinks that the family house holds more meaning than one’s heart. The house, after all, has the reliability of inanimate objects, “the reassuring madness of patterned wallpaper under the daily shift of light.” Rosaleen, at seventy-six, wants to sell it, provoking the crisis that consumes the final pages of the novel.

“The Green Road” is true and rueful, as terribly adult in its clarity as its battered Madigans. Enright understands adulthood as a kind of aberration that befalls families: siblings must grow up, but their maturity is oddly irrelevant to the atavism of the family unit. Beneath the social achievements of adult life beat the wings of childhood. Constance, Dan, Emmet, and Hanna hardly know one another as adults. Dan liked Emmet as a boy, “but, grown up, the man bored and frightened him.” (An extraordinarily sad sentence!) To be middle-aged is sometimes to feel that an imposter has grown up around oneself, has choked off one’s own youth. Constance feels her face to be “a shadow passing over the front of her head.” She collects Dan at Shannon Airport. Dan is now living happily in Toronto, and is on the verge of marrying a “big-featured” man named Ludo, a wealthy lawyer. Constance, who knows nothing about Ludo, nothing about the texture of her brother’s adult life, is living much as she was in 1997. And Dan knows little about his sister’s Irish existence. They are people linked only by memory, and the writing opens out magnificently to incorporate and memorialize that memory:

Dan was a year younger than Constance, fifteen months. His growing up struck her as daft, in a way. So she was not bothered by her brother’s gayness—except, perhaps, in a social sense—because she had not believed in his straightness, either. In the place where Constance loved Dan, he was eight years old.

He stood beside her as she sorted out the ticket, then they walked across the car park together, almost amused.

This was the boy who ran alongside her in her dreams. Constance, asleep, never saw his face exactly, but it was Dan, of course it was, and they were on the beach in Lahinch coming round a headland to find something unexpected. And the thing they found was the River Inagh as it ran across the sands into the sea. Sweet water into salt. Constance had been there many times as an adult, and the mystery of it remained for her. Rainwater into seawater, you could taste where they met and mingled, and no way to tell if all this was good or bad, this turbulence, if it was corruption or return. ♦

James Wood has been a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker since 2007.